Hi. It’s been a while. I thought we had a thread about this somewhere, but I can’t find it for some reason. Weird. Whatever, if someone knows where that thread went then this can get merged with that.
As a refresher, I had a thread - or at least I thought I had a thread - about Ted Hoffman Sr. and his struggles with a degenerative neurological condition and the resulting problems it caused, which led him to go from his apartment into assisted living after some period of time trying to get the rest of my siblings on board. And I think I had discussed a little bit of his time in assisted living, how things were going there, the good/bad of it, and generally laying out his progress toward end of life. And some of you offered your own personal experiences with dealing with your parents, your SOs dealing with their parents and how you were involved with that, and so on.
For me, the final pages are about to be written.
Dad fell out of bed on Friday. He also fell out of bed on Thursday, but apparently was fine. The fall on Friday, staff found him as they came to get him for lunch. They got him up, he wanted to go back to bed, they put him back in bed. He didn’t complain about anything. Dinner came, he didn’t want to go. Fine, we’ve said if he doesn’t want to go he doesn’t have to.
Saturday morning, breakfast. He wants to go down, they take him down. He can’t swallow. Granted, his food is blended because he can’t chew and it’s been that way for several weeks, but he can’t swallow even that. Can’t swallow liquid. The facility calls, says “something is wrong, he needs to go to the hospital.” Ambulance takes him, he goes to ER, they run tests including a CT scan checking for something neurological.
He’s broken the C2 vertebrae. It’s not a perfect break like if it were a hanging, but it’s pretty impressive for not doing that.
He’s not a candidate for surgery, which rules out flying him to the major city for that. The local hospital, still a Level I trauma center, can’t do anything for him. Running an IV and doing fluids only drags out the endgame, and he’s already lost 40 lbs. this calendar year and is skin and bones. That leaves “keep him as pain free as possible, let nature finish its course” which is where we’re at.
On one hand it sucks for all the obvious reasons. On the other hand, it’s better because we don’t have to worry about him choking to death, or aspirating on food and having infections that follow and that death. And, we don’t have a fall that leads to something like a brain bleed, which leads to a stroke, which leads to throwing a clot elsewhere. This is about as good a scenario as we could hope for, other than him breaking his neck.
I’ll have one more update when he finally goes, which I expect will be in about 3-4 days depending on how long his body can hold out.
